Don't Read This If You Don't Want Us to Spoil Top Gear’s New Reasonably Priced Car

If you can’t wait to see Sunday’s Top Gear episode, the first one from the motoring show’s 20th season, then let us spoil it for you…gently. This first paragraph can be read with the utmost confidence that we will not reveal anything, aside from the fact that they are changing their reasonably priced car, and getting one with a familiar badge from closer to home…

They’re ditching the Kia Cee-apostrophe-D, in favor of a similar car in terms of class, price and performance, from the offering of a more traditional, local manufacturer – Vauxhall’s Astra hatch.

This means that all track times posted before are irrelevant, and just like they did with the transition from the Chevrolet Lacetti to the Kia, they are going to start over with a clean, empty board and have many celebrities, including Angelina Jolie (again), post up lap times so that the population of the list takes less time.

Next up it’s another epiccar versus something else race, in which Toyota’s new Auris is actually featured on TV, despite not being the most exciting car to watch. James will not be driving it, though, leaving that up to Jeremy, as we saw in the trailer, and also according to the same video teaser, as well as a recent Reddit post, Captain Slow will be racing aboard a yacht. We won't tell you who wins, though...

There also seems to be a hot hatch shootout planned, featuring the current crop of supermini-based offerings: Ford Fiesta ST, Renault Clio RS and Peugeot 208 GTi. This for me, and probably most of you too, will be the part of the show that arouses the most interest, and I think the new kid (the Peugeot, which we drove) will surprise Clarkson, who is usually cynical about Peugeots.